Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.

As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.

You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.

You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.

You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.

In other words:

Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.

Thanks.

I don't understand why so many people fight this war of tabs vs spaces. My colleagues elegantly solved the problem just not using indentation at all

This code review gave me eye cancer.

So, first of all, let me apologize to anyone impacted by eye cancer, if that really is a thing... because that sounds absolutely horrible. But, believe me, this code was absolutely horrible, too.

I was asked to code review another team's script. I don't like reviewing code from other teams, as I'm pretty "intense" and a nit-picker -- my own team knows and expects this, but I tend to really piss off other people who don't expect my level of input on "what I really think" about their code...

So, I get this script to review. It's over 200 lines of bash (so right away, it's fair game for a boilerplate "this should be re-written in python" or similar reply)... but I dive in to see what they sent.

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

So, I certainly cannot violate IP rules and post any of the actual code here (be thankful - be very thankful), but let me just say, I think it may be the worst code I've ever seen. And I've been coding and code-reviewing for upwards of 30 years now. And I've seen a LOT of bad code...

I imagine the author of this script was a rebellious teenager who found the google shell scripting style guide and screamed "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!" at it and then set out to flagrantly violate every single rule and suggestion in the most dramatic ways possible.

Then they found every other style guide they could, and violated all THOSE rules, too. Just because they were there.

Within the same script... within the SAME CODE BLOCK... 2-space indentation... 4-space indentation... 8-space indentation... TAB indentation... and (just to be complete) NO indentation (entire blocks of code within another function of conditional block, all left-justified, no indentation at all).

lowercase variable/function names, UPPERCASE names, underscore_separated_names, CamelCase names, and every permutation of those as well.

Comments? Not a single one to be found, aside from a 4-line stanza at the top, containing a brief description of that the script did and (to their shame), the name of the author. There were, however, ENTIRE BLOCKS of code commented out.

[ In the examples below, I've replaced indentation spacing with '-', as I couldn't get devrant to format the indentation in a way to suitably share my pain otherwise... ]

Within just a few lines of one another, functions defined as...

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

Another_Function() {
------------stuff
}

There were conditionals blocks in various forms, indentation be damned...

if [ ... ]; then
--stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
--then
----some_stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
then
----something
something_else
--another_thing
fi

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]; then
--SOME_VAR="blah"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
----then
----SOME_VAR="foo"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
--then
--echo "SOME_VAR must be set"
fi

Do you remember the classic "demo" programs people used to distribute (like back in the 90s) -- where the program had no real purpose other than to demonstrate various graphics, just for the sake of demonstrating graphics techniques? Or some of those really bad photo slideshows, were the person making the slideshow used EVERY transition possible (slide, wipe, cross-fade, shapes, spins, on and on)? All just for the sake of "showing off" what they could do with the software? I honestly felt like I was looking at some kind of perverse shell-script demo, where the author was trying to use every possible style or obscure syntax possible, just to do it.

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

There was absolutely no consistency, even within 1-2 adjacent lines. There is no way to maintain this. It's nearly impossible even understand what it's trying to do. It was just pure insanity. Lines and lines of insanity.

I picture the author of this code as some sort of hybrid hipster-artist-goth-mental-patient, chain-smoking clove cigarettes in their office, flinging their own poo at their monitor, frothing at the mouth and screaming "I CODE MY TRUTH! THIS CODE IS MY ART! IT WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR WORLDLY STANDARDS!"

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

Then I contacted my HR hotline to see if our medical insurance covers eye cancer.

TOP 10 PROGRAMMING BEST PRACTICES

#1 Start numbering from 0.
#10 Sort elements in lexicographic order for readability.
    #2 Use consistent indentation.
#3 use Consistent Casing.
#4.000000000000001 Use floating-point arithmetic only where necessary.
#5 Not avoiding double negations is not smart.
#6 Not recommended is Yoda style.
#7 See rule #7.
#8 Avoid deadlocks.
#9 ISO-8859 is passé - Use UTF-8 if you ▯ Unicode.
#A Prefer base 10 for human-readable messages.
#10 See rule #7.
#10 Don't repeat yourself.

Please end my life!
This is in my IT book:

Friend: Dude, could you look at my code, see what's wrong??

Me: Its not indented. Indent is properly first..

Finally a keyboard made for waffling on about how your indentation character choice is strictly superior to the other option

10 levels deep code,
3K+ Lines,
No indentation.

ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

pfft, all you bloody 2 space indentation hipsters

4 spaces for life!

I just hate when stuff like this happens...

Is there a natural cure for eye cancer?

Really annoyed by the endless tabs vs spaces discussion.
From now on, I use 4 tabs as indentation.

Indentation check
Hardecoded values check
Kickass logic check

This is the best program that I have seen in my entire life.

This is the shit I have to deal with in school. Teacher told us to review each others code. This is one of the gems i found so far. Some people just wants to see the world burn...

"Only one level of indentation per method". This image just made my day :)

tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.

We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.

Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.

Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.

Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.

After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.

Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.

He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.

Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.

To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.

Python -> indentation
HTML -> <!doctype HTML>
C++. -> int main()
PHP. -> <?php ?>

These are the fundamentals for some popular languages. Than there is this;

Lisp. -> ()

Like it doesn't give a fuck.
Not a single one.
I like that.

Because apparently this douchebag thought writing else is too mainstream. And indentation, that is for noobs.

One of our GOVERNMENT ICT papers had a python code with no indentation at all

I had a coworker used to write PHP pages in this way:

<?php
echo "<html>";
echo "<head>";
// 2000+ lines of un-indented nightmares

I tried suggesting him to keep the HTML outside php tags as much as possible and I stressed out that adding some indentation to the code would have improved readability. I also sent him an example of my code created using an IDE with auto-indent functionality.

His creepy answer was: «Readability is subjective. Anyway I'll try to get used to the sinusoidal trend of your code.»

I fucking hate python and myself even more. Python is easy they say, Python has nice syntax but fuck you . Fuck you seriously I cringe if I see non-c-like syntax. Every time I leave my comfort zone I get fucked over by damn semicolons. Fuck this imports i don't know your damn library. But god damn In far too advanced for hello world. There are two versions and the lib I want to use is incompatible? Well fuck me? That kind of shit never hit me on PHP. Damn me! Fuck you python. I want to know you but you fuck me harder than life. GEHÖRT? DU FICKST MICH HÄRTE ALS DAS LEBEN DU HURENSOHN!!!!

What is even your problem? Indentation? Well thank you for not having braces! I mean come on I try, I really do. I know you are different but every thing I want to learn about you is either for uber beginners or so advanced I don't even know what's going on. Do magical shit in a few lines? What the fuck is in those packages? A wizard full filling whishes like "plz make this work"?

But don't worry you cum snorting unicorn as much as I hate you I'm more mad about me for not being a descendant of fucking slytherin!

Deadly indentation...

The problem with my life is acceptance from others. Validation (almost wrote vladiation).

For instance, I finished my course in Advanced Java Programming a few days ago. Supposed to be a year course or some shit, finished it in two months. They told me I don't need to go to the remainder classes and I could write the examination. Got the certifications, passed with flying colours.
Well done me? No, fuck you me. "It's not through Oracle, so it's completely useless. Har har you wasted your measly salary on a course and it means nothing". You know what? Fuck you and fuck validation. I will validate myself from now on.

Anywhom, what a start to a shitty rant. Let's go over some generic points so I can finally make my avatar.

IE can suck a duck ("oooh you made it and it runs fine in every fucking browser except fucking IE - slow clap).

Chrome RAM usage can suck a duck, two times. (just generic post, don't actually give a shit - I use Firefox).

People who can't use one fucking indentation standard ("oooh two spaces, oooh three spaces, oooooh a fucking tab button... " etc) can fuck off.

That fucker who came and converted my buildings in Age of Empires with the "wolololo" priest can fuck off too.

Been reading through devRant and you know what? You guys are pretty cool

So we had a dev on our team who was on a performance improvement plan, wasn't going to pass it, but decided to quit before it was over saving us 2 weeks.

I was ecstatic when he left (caused us hell). I knew updating his code wouldn't be great, but he was only here 6 months

"how bad could it be" - practiseSafeHex - moron, idiot, suicidal.

A little run down would be:

- Despite the fact that we use Angular 2+, one of his apps is Angular 1 ... Nobody on the team has ever used Angular 1.

- According to his package.json he seems to require both mongoDb and Cloudant (couchDb).

- Opened up a config file (in plaintext) to find all the API keys and tokens.

- Had to rename all the projects (micro services) because they are all following a different style of camelcase and it was upsetting my soul.

- All the projects have a "src" folder for ... you know ... the source code, except sometimes we've decided to not use it for you know, reasons.

- Indentation is a mess.

- He has ... its like ... ok I don't even know wtf that is suppose to be.

- Curly braces follow a different pattern depending on the file you open. Sometimes even what function you look at.

- The only comments, are ones that are not needed. For example 30+ lines of business logic and model manipulation ... no comment. But thank god we have a comment over `Fs.readFile(...)` saying /* Read the config file */. Praise Jesus for that one, would have taken me all week to figure that out.

Managers have been asking me how long the "clean up" will take. They've been pushing me towards doing as little as possible and just starting the new features on top of this ... this "code".

The answer will be ... no ... its getting deleted, any machine its ever been on is getting burned, and any mention of it will be grounds for death.

TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

Wouldn't say this is the worst thing, but this indentation really kills me.

My friend loves Dreamweaver... And continuously says that he doesn't understand what people see in it that is so wrong... It does the job right?...... Fucking blind...

Uses a bootstrap plugin which generates HTML code for bootstrap.
I did not know this at the time.

Comes to me the night before submission.
He: Dude i need help quick! I've got the presentation tomorrow morning and bootstrap fucked up the links to my style sheets or something, my page is broken and won't work. I should have done what you did and gone for Foundation...
Me: Yeah, because the bootstrap framework definitely affects the style links...
He: help me out man, please! I can't do this anymore!

I had my submission the day after him to prepare still...

Me: Teamviewer. Now.

Log on to Teamviewer.
See what he's using to code...
Dreamweaver..... Niiiiice....

I go through the code. There are empty divs with &nbsc; in them everywhere.. some HTML elements haven't been closed, no comments, indentation seems to be completely random. All the usual shit storm of a novice web designer.
The only thing is, this guy I know knows how to indent, I've seen his previous work. Why is this so horrible then???
I ask what the hell happened, it looked like a nuclear explosion happened!

He: Yeah I'm using this great plugin for Dreamweaver which lets me click and it puts in Bootstrap elements! It's great!

........ You're blaming the bootstrap framework for affecting your links to your stylesheets, you're using an elements generator, you're not checking what the FUCK it puts into your code, not fixing the indenting, not checking the standard HTML rules are followed AND YOU WONDER WHY IT'S BROKEN???

Kill me now.

I'M SO PROUD, I WROTE A FULLY-FUNCTIONAL JSON PARSER!

I used some data from the devRant API to test it :D
(There's a lot of useful tests in the devRant API like empty arrays, mixed arrays and objects, and nested objects)

Here's the devRant feed with one rant, parsed by Lua!

You can see the type of data (automatically parsed) before the name of the data, and you can see nested data represented by indentation.

The whole thing is about 200 lines of code, and as far as I can tell, is fully-featured.

::python coding::

Friend: "so I have to press tab when I want to code inside a function, right?"

Me (Busy): "yea yea, whenever you enter a new scope. Indentation is important in python..."

Friend: "what's a scope?"

#$ cowsay "dafaq"

Me: "bruh, what you doin in Computer Engineering?"

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

My computer science teacher is very sly: while you are working he stands right behind you for some time, so you start writing good code, functions for everything, perfect indentation... But you don't know if he is still behind you, and you're not brave enough to look back, so you write good code for the rest of the lesson.
What a good prof

Is it just me, or is using --> for indentation just dumb?

Got that colorchanging cup from my girlfriend. I love her and the cup, but.the indentation infuriates me

If you indent like this, I'm going to find you, and I'm going to kill you.

My eyes are already sore, 12 minutes after arriving to the office.

While working, my dad would come and stand behind me. Looking at the indentation, he would sarcastically say things like "Don't you know how to write?" or "Why are you writing so ziggy zaggy? " or "All these years of education, for what?"

The first two or three times I really had a good laugh. But after that, I really get pissed off.

Dear Author, burn in hell for printing a great book with such bad indentation. It triggers my developer OCD every time and i can not stop reading ...

I love group projects.
There is no greater feeling than, after you set up the repository with the first code files, your team mate changes the indentation and commenting style in every file to his own style without even discussing the general coding style rules in the group first.

Fucking awesome start.

Go eat a sack of unwashed hobo balls you filthy cunt.

After using StackOverflow for years, it makes me mad that the devRant community hates on it saying "i get downvotes", "people are assholes". But when you go ahead and see those questions, the Poster took less that 15 seconds to copy/paste their shitcode with poor indentation, no context, no question, no expectation description, and no result description.

YET, THEY DEMAND FREE HELP and for people willing to help, to BREAK THEIR FUCKING EYES reading your non indented and/or non preformatted crap of shitcode

Listen here you little shit, if you don't take at least fucking 5 minutes to let me know what the fuck are you trying to do, what the fuck have you tried, and what the FUCKING SHITFUCK you expected to happen, THEN DON'T GO RANTING LIKE A PRE-PUBERT GREASY KID ON WHY YOUR FUCKING QUESTION GOT DOWNVOTED.

The problem is YOU AND YOUR LACK OF CONSIDERATION TOWARDS OTHER DEVELOPERS, <BOLD>WHO ARE WILLING TO DO FIX YOUR SHITCODE FOR FREE</BOLD>

It took me a while to understand that, when I started posting years ago. But once I learned, it was extremely helpful.

SO SHUT THE FUCK UP, BE HUMBLE, AND WRITE A PROPER FUCKING QUESTION.

WHY AM I RANTING ABOUT THIS, YOU ASK? WELL SOME FUCKTARD JUST POSTED "java - if(Plot Number == booked)then change the color of CardViewBackground color and text color Recyclerview Android", AND THE FUCKING BODY IS JUST A COPY PASTE OF A SHITCODE JAVA CLASS.

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT TO GET WITH THIS???

OOOOHHHHH BUT, I'M SURE AS FFFUUUCKKKK HE'S GOING TO CRY TO DEVRANT ABOUT HIS FUCKING QUESTION GETTING 3 DOWNVOTES.

Someone just asked me to properly indent my code and add comments.
feeling molested.

TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation

Me: *slams head against keyboard*

For about 6 months when I started coding php I didn't think indentation was worth it so all of my files were like
}
}
}
}
}

teacher - gives a lecture about Java Naming Conventions...

Opens Notepad, ( he doesn't use an IDE, when I asked him he told he haven't worked on a IDE before )

and does this

public int user_account_number;

me - *wtf*

thanks God he didn't mess up with the braces and indentation otherwise I would have got eye cancer( already the white theme of notepad was causing nausea)

Keep a tab on people who use spaces for indentation.

So I once had a job as a C# developer at a company that rewrote its legacy software in .Net after years of running VB3 code - the project had originally started in 1994 and ran on Windows 3.11.

As one of the only two guys in the team that actually knew VB I was eventually put in charge of bug for bug compatibility. Since our software did some financial estimations that were impossible to do without it (because they were not well defined), our clients didn't much care if the results were slightly wrong, as long as they were exactly compatible with the previous version - compatibility proved the results were correct.

This job mostly consisted of finding rounding errors caused by the old VB3 code, but that's not what I'm here to talk about today.

One day, after dealing with many smaller functions, I felt I was ready to finally tackle the most complicated function in our code. This was a beast of a function, called Calc, which was called from everywhere in the code, did a whole bunch of calculations, and returned a single number. It consisted of 500 or so lines of spaghetti.

This function had a very peculiar structure:

Function Calc(...)
...
If SomeVariable Then
...
If Not SomeVariable Then
...
(the most important bit of calculation happened here)
...
End If
...
End If
...
End Function

But for some reason it actually worked. For days I tried to find out what's going on, where the SomeVariable was being changed or how the nesting indentation was actually wrong and didn't match the source, but to no avail. Eventually, though, after many days, I did find the answer.

SomeVariable = 1

Somehow, the makers of VB3 though it would be a good idea for Not X to be calculated as (-1 - X). So if a variable was not a boolean (-1 for True, 0 for False), both X and Not X could be truthy, non-zero values.

And kids these days complain about JavaScript's handling of ==...

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using indentation instead of braces? I wasted 5 fucking hours of my life tracing a bug which eventually came down to incorrect indentation of a return statement which pushed it inside the loop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FML

And the PR has already been merged into master! How will I face everyone on Monday!

I thank my OCD for well indented code

Refactoring code of somebody who left and:

- Plagued the code with TYPOS (milions of them but ok I can live with those... to a certain point)
- Used global variables by default.... of course even where they're not needed
- Used comments only in parts of code where... well they're not needed, important ones are of course left out
- Did not indent code. 3..2..1... Did not FUCKING indent code properly and when he did... did WRONG!
- Instead of indentation he used commented line with multiple ==== signes.... so far top is 60 consecutive lines with olny ==== again no apparent pattern here
- Did not follow a fucking standard in variable naming... no camle casing... there are varaibles assigned multiple times to "temp" variables without no reason just for the sake of wasting resources on the system I guess

This is just the beginning of the review but I already want to change job, die, scream, cry... not in any specific order.

So we are in computer lab with some bitch ass c++ program on the board,,its approx. 150 sloc with lot of if's and else's...halfway into the session my friend rolls on his chair comes to my system asking for help, i say sure dude why not.
So we both roll to his system and that bastard has 0 indentation,a set of brackets for every if else even for non-compound statements with every bracket in a line of its own.......
With great difficulty of restraining myself from punching him in the face,,,i politely ask him"Have you ever coded in python"
He says no
I say "that was a rhetorical question"

Everyone around us bursts into laughter and that poor lad still has no idea what just happened

Python should be made compulsory for fags like these,, they'll know the meaning of indentation only then

What is that? Ada uses three spaces for indentation?
(ノꐦಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Worst indentation ever...

Notepad++ is best. It take seconds to launch and provide color schemes for every language and its indentation is really good.

A LOT of this article makes me fairly upset. (Second screenshot in comments). Sure, Java is difficult, especially as an introductory language, but fuck me, replace it with ANYTHING OTHER THAN JAVASCRIPT PLEASE. JavaScript is not a good language to learn from - it is cheaty and makes script kiddies, not programmers. Fuck, they went from a strong-typed, verbose language to a shit show where you can turn an integer into a function without so much as a peep from the interpreter.

And fUCK ME WHY NOT PYTHON?? It's a weak typed but dynamic language that FORCES good indentation and actually has ACCESS TO THE FILE SYSTEM instead of just the web APIs that don't let you do SHIT compared to what you SHOULD learn.

OH AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE CAKE, the article was comparing hello worlds, and they did the whole Java thing right but used ALERT instead of CONSOLE.LOG for JavaScript??? Sure, you can communicate with the user that way too but if you're comparing the languages, write text to the console in both languages, don't write text to the console in Java and use the alert api in JavaScript.

Fuck you Stanford, I expected better you shitty cockmunchers.

This Indentation of a government exam model paper 🤯

I know it's not done yet but OOOOOH boy I'm proud already.

Writing a JSON parser in Lua and MMMM it can parse arrays! It converts to valid Lua types, respects the different quotation marks, works with nested objects, and even is fault-tolerant to a degree (ignoring most invalid syntax)

Here's the JSON array I wrote to test, the call to my function, and another call to another function I wrote to pretty print the result. You can see the types are correctly parsed, and the indentation shows the nested structure! (You can see the auto-key re-start at 1)

Very proud. Just gotta make it work for key/value objects (curly bracket bois) and I'm golden! (Easier said than done. Also it's 3am so fuck, dude)

TL.DR.: Emojis in commit messages + bad commit messages made by Microsoft™ employees.

Yes, I'm looking at you Microsoft. It would be helpful if I can, you know, understand your commit messages instead of trying to guess wtf _that_ emoji means. That is, if it is the same emoji on my machine. We didn't figure that one out yet. And no, "Some 💄 changes ✨" is not a good commit message, even if you interpret it correctly (which depends on your emoji icon set).

idk about you, but that shitty 💄 emoji tends to be (see image) and I happen to associate that with an XLR audio cable. I had to ask someone else to understand a commit message; a message supposed to be explicit—stating what you changed and optionally why you changed it (you can off-load that part to an issue tracker).

Furthermore, that "Some 💄 changes ✨" commit did none of that. "I made cosmetic changes somewhere for some reason without linking to an issue." If you didn't catch that little detail yet: "COSMETIC CHANGES" is vague as fuck. What is a cosmetic change?

* Does a cosmetic change mean adjusting indentation?
* Does it mean deleting unnecessary abstraction to make the code more readable?
* Does it mean refactoring code to add that beauty factor?
* Does it mean all of the above? Or perhaps a specific combination of these?

Human communication is shit enough, don't make it worse than it already is.

So...

I'm looking for my first job as a web developer. I kept seeing these rants about how horrible and frustrating job searching is, all of which I thought were greatly exaggerated. They're all just jokes and memes, right?

Nope.

Every fucking meme seems to be true.

- Junior developer with +4 years of experience, expert in their field - check!

- Listing requirements for 6 different jobs under "Full-stack developer" - check!

- "Expert developer required ASAP" - $10/hour - check!

- 100% remote ... *scrolls all the way down* ... for 2 days of the week - check!

- Entry level font-end position - must be an expert in Vue, Angular, React, AWS, Drupal, Wordpress, PHP, Python, ES9+, OOP, TDD, BDD - check!

- "Cool" description written in js code with no indentation - check!

And I'm not seeing these every once in a while or something like that. No. Most of the posts are like this. I thought I may just be underqualified since I've never had a real job before, but this just seems crazy to me...

Ok... Indentation styles.
Usually I'm an advocate for letting people program how they want as long as it's readable, etc.
But I'm training somebody at the moment and had to bite my tongue when they started doing this...

Please tell me I'm not the only one who thinks that yaml is a horrible format

What's worse than no indentation is bad indentation.

I had a friend once with this irritating habit.

Apparently some freaking man in my ex-team tried to learn Vim because he thought he could become more efficient but he spend more than two weeks trying it while delivering poor quality code with extra spaces, bad indentation and extra "wq" strings

Franz is his name, he is our new programmer. He got task to made a calendar to display ongoing ads with javascript, and damn good he done it fast. Until today, he not coming because he got ill and i have to edit his calendar code because there's a change request.I look at his code and thinking how he read this code? no indentation, bracket everywhere, etc. Then I call him:

Me: Franz, can you explain your code to me?
Franz: Sure, but.. umm.. I forgot to bookmark the stackoverflow link.
Me: ...

Trying to write more commit , so that i can stay top in github project chart with less real code be like....
Git commit -am "added p in code"
Git commit -am "added r in code"
Git commit -am " added i in code"
Git commit -am "added n in code"
Gir commit -am "added t in code"
Git commit -am " gave the proper indentation to print"

Found this on twitter. OMG

I’ve been programming with other languages than Python for so long that when I finally had to pick up Python to help teach my friend some python I felt like I was rediscovering a past life.

With Python I feel like King Fucking Arthur with the Holy Blade Excalibur, armored up and ready for fucking war.
When I’m writing a script I feel like I’m parrying and piercing my blade straight through that fuckers chest and slam them into the fucking ground. And leave their bleeding out cold dying body on the fucking ground with no hope in their eyes.

Although when an indentation error occurs I feel like I just fucking tripped over a fucking pebble and apparently stairs were nearby and I bash my head on all 1024 steps, get to the bottom to just to get some fucking Java Chad punt my fucking head like a fucking football screaming random reasons to not use python.

SICK AND TIRED OF READABILITY VS. EFFICIENCY!!!!!!!

I HAD TO SEPARATE A 4 LOC JSON STRING, WHICH HAD AN ARRAY OF A SINGLE KEY-VALUE PAIRS (TOTAL OF 10 OBJECTS IN THE ARRAY).

ITS READABLE IF YOU KNOW JSON. HOW HARD IS TO READ JSON FORMAT IF YOU GET YOUR STYLE AND INDENTATION PROPERLY?!?

SO I HAD TO
BREAK THE POOR FREAKING JSON APART TO A FUCKING DIFFERENT YAML FILE FORMAT ONLY SO I CAN CALL IT FROM THERE TO THE MAIN CONTROLLER, ITERATE AND MANIPULATE ALL THE ID AND VALUES FROM YAML BACK TO MATCH THE EXPECTED JSON RESPONSE IN THE FRONT END.

THE WHOLE PROCESS TOOK ME ABOUT 15 MINUTES BUT STILL, THE FUCKING PRINCIPLE DRIVES ME INSANE.

WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I WASTE TIME AT AN ALREADY WORKING PIECE OF CODE, TO MAKE IT LESS EFFICIENT AND A SLIGHTLY BIT MORE READABLE?!? FML.

What is considered best practice for code indentation? When I'm working with HTML and Javascript my rule of thumb is 2 spaces for indentation, and with Java and Python it's 4 spaces.

Also I'm trying to break my bad habit of mixing tabs and spaces. It's messing with the laws of physics.

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.

Give a man teh codez, and he eats for a day. Congrats, you fed a help vampire.

Teach a man teh codez, and you open up to him the wonderful world of tabs vs spaces, dependency hell, emacs vs vim, being everybody's personal tech support, Linux vs Windows, legacy code, stack overflow, language wars, terrible documentation, functional vs oop, and arguments about what the best indentation style is. Forget about eating, production's down.

I'm reading the source code of PuTTY. There's mixed tabs and spaces everywhere!

I think i found the most efficient way of formatting code. I found this gem at school.

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

Poor indentation will be the death of me

!rant
What's your favorite style of indentation and why is it tabs?

This is something I'll never forget.

I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.

I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.

Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).

Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).

The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).

The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".

Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.

I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.

I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.

All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".

Am i the only one who is so sensitive about indentation? It really pisses me off when i see code with bad levels of indentation because it completely overtakes my years of programming experience and i understand nothing. Also indentation level should be 4, not 2. Who the hell uses 2 level indentation, you don't deserve a keyboard.

Converting spaces to tabs made my file 10% smaller (5050 characters to 4500).

Either good argument against spaces or my code with compulsive indentation disorder.

We don't need no vim
We don't need no C++
We don't need no Internet
We don't need no devRant
We don't need Java
We don't need Windoze
We don't need spaces for indentation
We don't need School

*passive aggressive smiley*

No indentation hurts my eyes x__x

P.s. This is actually someone from my college who is apparently in his last year of completing his Bachelors in Computer Science...

Hi fellow code indenters,

I am a tab indenter myself because each dev on the same project can decide how much the indentation is. Some prefer 4, some 2, some prefer both depending on language.

Now I already asked a few space indenters here why spaces. Because I never heard a good argument for using spaces instead of tabs. Each time I asked I didn't get an answer.

So this time once again: why would you use spaces over tabs for indentation?
I want to make a good decision and for that I need arguments for both.

We might achieve world peace one day and still won't have agreed over indentation.

Indentation = TAB. Just 1 character (N spaces = N characters = more disk space, duh!). And then each dev can chose their own TAB width (in spaces) in their IDE of choice. Beautiful.

When a senior developer changes your impeccable code and pushes their ugly indented lines with bad naming scheme without review.

Today I experienced cruelty of C and mercy of Sublime and SublimeLinter.

So yesterday I was programming late at night for my uni homework in C. So I had this struct:

typedef struct {
int borrowed;
int user_id;
int book_id;
unsigned long long date;
} entry;

and I created an array of this entry like this:

entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);

and my program compiled. But at the output, there was something strange...

There were some weird hexadecimal characters at the beginning but then there was normal output. So late at night, I thought that something is wrong with printf statement and I went googling... and after 2 hours I didn't found anything. In this 2 hours, I also tried to change scanf statement if maybe I was reading the wrong way. But nothing worked. But then I tried to type input in the console (before I was reading from a file and saving output in a file). And it outputted right answer!!! AT THAT POINT I WAS DONE!!! I SAID FUCK THIS SHIT I AM GOING TO SLEEP.

So this morning I continued to work on homework and tried on my other computer with other distro to see if there is the same problem. And it was..

So then I noticed that my sublime lint has some interesting warning in this line
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);
Before I thought that is just some random indentation or something but then I saw a message: Size of pointer 'arr' is used instead of its data.

AND IT STRUCT ME LIKE LIGHTNING.

I just changed this line to this:
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(entry) * n);

And It all worked fine. At that moment I was so happy and so angry at myself.

Lesson learned for next time: Don't program late at night especially in C and check SublimeLInter messages.

> raw http request injected in the model
> 400 lines long method, followed by three 300 lines long methods
> no autocomplete, no comments
> code called by the whole application, I mess up once there's at least 150 other components that might break
> no documentation, no tests
> pyramid of doom, 13 levels of indentation

Those are the same people getting all puffed up because the cat dared to sit on my shoulder during a call. Management focused on the real fucking problems, no doubt.

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

@dfox feature idea: code formatting. Either indentation or special characters to demarcate code

So I've taken over a project, well, not really taken over, we've been hired to add more functionality to a Wordpress site.

I have never seen such a messy code in my life... variables have mixed languages, indentation is a mix of tabs, 2, 3 and 4 spaces, camelcase, snake case, short names, long names. ' and ", no spaces after commas (gotta save those bytes doode)
Almost like it has been copypasted from everywhere.

I think I said 10-15 hours for it. I think I will spend a lot more time tidying up this code.

Hey, look, 3 index files!!
index.php
index__backup.php
index__backup_2.php

I don't dare to look into the CSS or JS, but I know I have to

When you screw up the Python indentation beyond repair, and you have to re-indent 100s of lines of code -_-

Dear intern, if you really really have the urge to use fucking spaces for indentation because it let's you feel like being some Google hipster, then PLEASE AT LEAST REMOVE THE SPARE ONES WHEN YOU FUCKING COPY PASTE CODEBLOCKS!!!1!!1111!

I'm perfectly OK if people wanna use spaces if they use it in an OCD-proof manner.

Nah, let's be honest: Spaces are a filthy way to indent stuff. Tabs are in a lot ways superior and if an editor can't render tabs correctly, the editor is a piece of worm puke.

Indentation is for pussies amiright?

What is worse?

lack of indentation
lack of spaces in the compiled language
lack of blocks

Itsavesspacelikethissentencedoes!

When it comes to the indentation or look I am fully consistent.
But when it comes to naming I am inconsistent like a crack whore telling she's clean.
Camelcase, underscores inconsistent variable and function names. I use all of them within a single file. On some days I even switch languages.
I truly am miserable in code consistency. Is there any good advice to keep the code consistent?

I will make a Chrome extension that will automatically set the indentation to tabs and the indentation size to 4 (or whatever you specify) in the github editor. Would someone be interested?

God, Allman indentation style is such pain... God bless K&R...

For those who don't know, Allman is this:
void foo(void)
{
statement;
statement;
}

and K&R is this:
void bar(void) {
statement;
statement;
}

If your indentation looks like this you might as well look for help. ASAP.

Who the hell thought that spaces OR tabs for indentation was an option?
For Spaghetti Monster's sake. An space is to separate words, one at a time. Tabs are for indents.
PERIOD
.

I will leave it here
monday- tabs vs spaces
Tuesday- brackets indentation
wednesday- windows vs mac
Thursday- c# vs java
friday - windows vs linux
saturday- vi vs emacs
sunday- vs code vs intellij

I have code convention OCD.

My team really fucked up the code with their different indentation styles, and it really makes me want to kill them!! 😡😡😠

My best code review experience?

Company hired a new department manager and one of his duties was to get familiar with the code base, so he started rounds of code reviews.
We had our own coding standards (naming, indentation, etc..etc) and for the most part, all of our code would pass those standards 100%.

One review of my code was particularly brutal. I though it was perfect. In-line documentation, indentation, followed naming standards..everything. 'Tom' kept wanting to know the 'Why?'

Tom: 'This method where it validates the amount must be under 30. Why 30? Why is it hard-coded and not a parameter?'
<skip what it seemed like 50 more 'Why...?' questions>
Me: "I don't remember. I wrote that 2 years ago."
Tom: "I don't care if you wrote it yesterday. I have pages of code I want you to verify the values and answer 'Why?' to all of them. Look at this one..."

'Tom' was a bit of a hard-ass, but wow, did I learn A LOT. Coding standards are nice, but he explained understanding the 'What' is what we are paid for. Coders can do the "What" in their sleep. Good developers can read and understand code regardless of a coding standard and the mediocre developers use standards as a crutch (or worse, used as a weapon against others). Great developers understand the 'Why?'.

Now I ask 'Why?' a lot. Gotten my fair share of "I'm gonna punch you in the face" looks during a code review, but being able to answer the 'Why?' solidifies the team with the goals of the project.

When the fuck will people learn to handle errors as soon as possible and return early? I have been reading the some code all day and the amount of nested:
```
if(okay) {
... 200 lines of code
} else {
throw
}
```
is frustrating. the indentation is sometimes 6-7 tabs deep...

When in internship you have to read 150000 lines of code to make changes and the code does not have any comments, no indentation, no documentation, no wiki. You'll be like fuck this shit. I'm outta here.

The company I work at sends their developers out to other companies to help them work on projects and help them in other ways (advice when communicating to customers of on demand software for example).

While not on a project you are working in house training trainees and interns. Part of that is teaching them to show initiative and treating them as full developers. The 30 interns all discussed a git flow and code format.
During the third sprint (two weeks sprints) a team messaged me if I wanted to check their merge request for the sprint.

It took me a glance at the first file to know they didnt do any review themselves. I used my flywheel to check all their changes and without being able to read the code I saw indentation was all over the place, inconsistent bracket placements etc. I let them know I wouldnt check their code until it was according to their own standards.
Two days later I got the message to check it again. At first glance the indentation was fine so I started reading the code. Every single thing was hardcoded, not made to support mobile (or any resolution other than 1920×1080).
A week later they improved it and still not good. Gave them a few pointers like I would for any colleague and off they went to fix things. The code became worse and indentation was all over the place.

I told them the next time it shouldnt be a quick glance to be able to reject it again. By this time other teams came to me asking why it wasnt merged yet and I explained it to them. One of the teams couldnt do anything u til this was merged so I told them to implement it themselves. I was surprised that 4 teams came to me asking about a merge request, that was every team except the team whose pull request it was.

4 weeks after the intitial sprint the other team made a merge request and I had three small comments and then an hour later it was merged.

The other team messaged me why their merge request did went through (still havent seen any of their team in person, Im sitting 10 meters away from them behind a wall)
They also said that it was easier for them because they started from scratch. Thats when I called them in to discuss it all and if they were not interns but full time developers they would have been fired. I told them communication is key and that if you dont understand something you come in person to ask about it. They all knew I like teaching and have the patience to explain a single thing ten times, but the initiative should be theirs.

One of the team members is my current coworker and he learned his lesson by that. The others stopped with their study and started doing something completely else.

TL;DR
Merge request is open for 4 weeks, in the end another team started from scratch and finished it within a week. The original team didnt ask me questions or come to me in person, where other teams did.

DISCLAIMER: some of you might find it harsh, but in our experience it works the best for teaching and we know when people don't dare to ask questions and we help them in that too. It's all about the soft skills at our company.

Who even uses Vim over Emacs!
And Tabs over Spaces! 😂

Reading a Ray Wenderlich book to try give RxSwift a go. Book is well written and going well. But I’m grinding my teeth at the fact all the code samples use 2 space indentation. Despite the fact apples standard is 4 ... and you know tabs would let us decide.

I know it’s a small thing, but it’s really pissing me off

Python developers starts writing his code with indentation and on multiple lines. Javascript developers look at him and writes the entire script in one line. Php developers looks at python and js developer and starts writing $$$$$$$$$$$$$

Indentation is too mainstream.

*me browsing through my company's code style guide*
"You must not use spaces for indentation" - awesome!
"Files must not contain more than 4000 lines of code" - wtf?

In C# you can open as many scopes wherever you want at whatever time you please. Nested within themselves, doesn't matter.

Use this to fuck with the other developers on your team. Fence off their evil code behind a thousand curly braces!

Or maybe jazz up your indentation, give the code a nice and bouncy flow!

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

Today I was refactoring code with 10 levels of indentation. Java 8.
Lambdas.
Each one is a block which spans multiple lines, that makes the outer ones hundreds of lines long.

This should be forbidden: () -> { ... }

If you don't understand why, please never send me any code.

PS: intellij shows multiple errors on each line.

PPS: my colleague should be happy that I do not use swear words.

So I'm reading up on the HomeAssistant documentation to prepare for submitting to their repo. I was really excited to find such a nice repo to contribute to, but i suddenly had to reconsider when i found this:

Why can't people fucking indent their code?!!!

Jdjdjdjdkdksovsvesjdkdidkrj

Anyone who has experienced this without falling into desperation deserves a beer, I know I need one.

Colleague: Python says I have an indentation error, halp. *Sends screenshot*

You: okay, it says it's located on file.py line 39. Can I see the related line?

Colleague: *sends a screenshot of the whole file, without numbered lines*

You: ummm, could you send me the related lines tho?😐

Colleague: 😒 yeah. *Resends a screenshot of the error and the whole file...again*

You: I REALLY need you to send me only the function scope to help you cuz I can't visually debug the whole file on a picture.

Colleague: *sends a panned phone picture with an arrow to the function (half of it)*

Plot twist: she's your girlfriend.

[EDIT]

GF: I can't see it, I'll go have a snack.

It really pisses me off when people write

if (true)
{
// Something
}

instead of

if (true) {
// Something
}

While I prefer tabs over spaces for indentation, I usually don't mind using spaces as this is often decided project-wide(or even company-wide) by powers out of my reach and the people also normally decide to intend by the reasonable 4 spaces.
However, now I am working on a project with 2 spaces indentation and oh boy, what a pain it is to write any nested code.. am I really the only one with this problem?

I quite dislike the fact that Python is growing in popularity. It's a fun toy, but the syntax is so fucking annoying after a while. Forced indentation is certainly not my style. Furthermore, Python is generally not extremely performant, even as far as interpreted languages go.

I love python as a language but using it to work (Like... for money...?) seems very outlandish. It feels akin to scratch to me... very bizzare to think it is powering many complex AIs. Python is a toy.

Man, people have the weirdest fetishes for using the most unreadable acrobatic shell garbage you have ever seen.

Some StackOverflow answers are hilarious, like the question could be something like "how do I capture regex groups and put them in a variable array?".

The answer would be some multiline command using every goddamn character possible, no indentation, no spaces to make sense of the pieces.

Regex in unix is an unholy mess. You have sed (with its modes), awk, grep (and grep -P), egrep.
I'll take js regex anytime of the day.

And everytime you need to do one simple single goddamn thing, each time it's a different broken ass syntax.

The resulting command that you end up picking is something that you'll probably forget in the next hour.

I like a good challenge, but readability is important too.

Or maybe I have very rudimentary shell skills.

It’s been so long since I posted but this time it’s juicy again.

I got a coworker, no prio experience but already a year and few months into the job. He’s bad.
Magnitudes of bad!

We’re trying to teach him but to no avail. Everything about him sucks, major ballsack to be exact.

His attitude is to avoid every task, finishes nothing and then starts something new.

„Did you do X like we told you to?“
„No I started on Y, because I thought it [looks better, seems more interesting, thought that X is useless…]“

When you ask him much is done he is always „almost“ finished and needs your help on the „last 5-10%“. Yeah fuck that!

But that guy has a talent, his talent is to always give you technically correct answers which actually are complete bullshit.

„What are you doing at your job?“
„Staring at a screen and typing things.“ dude what?

That guy used the excuse „I can’t do maths“ on everything.

For an exam he had to calculate how long it would take to reach a certain amount if you would get some interest in that every year.
He asked the teacher for the formula. During the exam! And when the teacher didn’t want to give it to him he wrote plainly „can’t do maths“ on the paper and left

His code is of a quality as if he would write his first line in a week and then has the audacity to blame me and the colleagues for not explaining it right.

Ok you might think now we’re teaching him bad, or are too impatient. But honestly if you have to explain how to do a for loop for over about 15 months and get that attitude I think you get the right to be angry. I don’t mind explaining on how things work, even for the hundredth time, but then don’t tell me you understood, go behind my back, complain at a colleague how bad I explained, get explained by him and then do it again until you whored yourself through the whole staff!

It’s like he got the mind swiper from Men in black at home. Every day he hits the reset button.

He had a week of just changing indentation on a html file. Why? Because he wanted to find his style.

Yeah his style

if(a==b){
console.log(a);
}
else {
console.log(b)
}

And to produce code like that it takes him atleast 4 hours of trial and error.

And at the same time he goes arround and boasts what a super good programmer he his and that he can do some project work for them.
How we found out? Because he started working in those projects during work time at the office and asked us how to do things.
And he does so like a complete bastard!
Broken sql query? “No that query is perfect as it is, it’s supposed to show no results! But, just in theory, if I wanted to show some results, what would I need to change?”

I’m so mad about it and pissed on a personal level because he goes around blames everyone and the world for his short comings

🐍ever got random indentation errors in python, When there was no indentation error there??🙂

Oh my fucking God, the non dev we have on our team has no indentation or syntax filter whatsoever. I wouldn't be surprised if she has an unmatched or unclosed bracket somewhere. I'm gonna have to go in there and clean that shit up.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

I fucking hate two-space indentation. You might as well not indent at all.

I just found out that I should be using 4 spaces and not a tab for indentation, MY WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE.

I found this somewhere on the web

Most satisfying bug I fixed?

Indentation bug in python after searching hours for the bug. Yes, indentation bugs still happen in 2018. Thanks to TDD I failed fast otherwise it would take way longer to find the bug.

I do not understand people who critique Python for using indentation to mark code blcoks. I've seen multiple posts being like "Uhh in Python a missing space breaks everything and it's so hard to find it". Yeah so hard when the interpreter throws a parse error and tells you exactly which line it's on. Let me go back to a bracefest language, misplace a brace halfway through the file, and get told there's a syntax error at the end, and spend a whole two minutes finding it.

Got a nice PR merged. Happy because it's on a popular project with over 4k stars. Ashamed because 50% of the commits are changing indentation from 4 spaces to tabs 😌

All these people arguing between tabs and indentation. Use a beautify plugin or something and don't even care. Don't be a pious fool and keep coding man. Sentiments are wasteful.

!rant && 'suggestion'

What if we write cook book in pseudo code (or official development languages) instead of plain english so dumb fuck that can't follow a simple instruction like me could actually make something nice?

def mayonnaise:
mayonnaise = random.shuffle(['yolk', 'salt', 'pepper', 'mustard', 'vinegar'])

while(mayonnaise not "thick"):
mayonnaise.whip()
mayonnaise.append('olive oil')

mayonnaise.append('seasoning' || 'lemon juice')

Things I hate the most at the moment:
- PHP
- jQuery
- The person that coded this before me
- The fact that this person is swtiching from jQuery and native javascript over and over for no f*cking reason. Just why?
- My job
- My boss
- The big pile of sh*it that this code is (overall not just the screenshot), no separation of concern, logic code in the middle of the file, no proper slacing and indentation
- devRant no allowing me to put multiple images in one post, because the picture is just one of this whole mess, it's not even the worst part, you'd have nightmare if I showed it to you
- The mental breakdown I'm having

Ahh.. there is nothing like the joyous feeling of writing a working piece of code for your own personal projects.

I spent several weeks and a few hours today to finally get my Python automation script working and I am very proud of myself.

Here's what it does:
* open a text file, extract a specific string from it using rather complicated xpath
* open another text file and do the same
* replace result 1 with result 2
* log results
* close file
* automate the process

Even though it looks easy, I had to mess around with a lot of problems such as permissions, indentation, stream writing, file status, etc.

Now, instead of having to manually do this job, I can just let my machine do it!

I prefer three spaces indentation but nobody understands me. They just laugh at me.

I find your lack of consistent indentation

...

Disturbing

Going through some pretty fucked up shit right now : a string containing an SQL query goes though a 100+ lines function full of if{} else{} with up to 5 levels of indentation, where it replaces some parts of the query with other words... 😱

YAML files are one of the worst type I have ever seen until now. Fuck that shit. And fuck that indentation.

I once had to review and transform the code of one of my colleague at school which had no indentation, no spacing and was a clusterf*** of syntax errors. The nightmare was that it was all done in the ancient Turbo C++. So I opened up plain ol' Notepad and whipped up some decent code and helped him out of a tight situation.

Now he is no longer a programmer. :|

! Worst thing another dev did in our NodeJS code.

1. No indentation. Literally.
2. A single function in a module worth 1000 lines. I'm not even kidding. No breaking into smaller functions. Just a large rock with a lot of js mess scribbled.
3. No comments at all
4. Sending stray values to promises which were not required at all.
5. No jsdoc. Using camelCase and uppercase interchangeably.

From the moment I realised I was a TABs guy, and she a SPACEs person, it was all over. Love became terribly bad "indented" from that very moment.

No need for indentation

Current status of Eslint indentation rules:

Completely fucked

I just dealt with a 3 nested "if" statements in SQL. There is no indentation so I am quite frustrated since each "if" spans up to 2-30 lines.

I now understand why Python white space is significant

/ On the subject of C program
| indentation: "In My Egotistical
| Opinion, most people's C programs
| should be indented
|
| six feet downward and covered with
| dirt."
|
\ -- Blair P. Houghton
------------------------------------

Why the flying fuck does one indent Java code with two spaces? Coding standards exist for a reason, for fuck's sake!

FORMAT YOUR EFFING SQL!
There we go, much better.

I recently have been delegated the responsibility of managing a 4 people team by planning the sprints, scheduling tasks, and in general "take charge" (as said by the boss).

What bothers me is there is this "developer" with a heavily toxic attitude, who feels he is above all laws and knows everything just because he joined some months ago all of us.

He is basically a human linter. When he code reviews, you can get away with any major mistake if your linting and indentation (and all that shit) is according to "his standards".

A new guy recently joined the team and was given an overwhelming task by the boss just to test whether he belongs here. (Again, wrong, in my opinion). He didn't know any of the technologies he needs to work on to complete that task but he still learnt them and got a working product. Albeit not according to our God's "standards".

Cut to the chase, the asshole dev is now mocking him in PR comments and demeaning him in every discussion. As a "team lead", what should I do? If I let it go, it'll make the environment toxic and I don't want him to get away with it. If I do take any action, I don't want to be seen as as pussy who can't take such minor insults. Please advise.

PS. The asshole developer once wrote a "friend request accept" API endpoint in such a way that when any single person accepts a request, that'll cause all pending requests (from any person to any person) get accepted. Fucked up the DB queries basically. This is just to give a perspective on what I'm dealing with here.

I don't want to use Visual Basic!

I'm a 17 year old boy and I have a couple of years of experience with coding. At school we had to choose between a couple of things to do 2 hours every week. One of them was about computers and programming. Sounds fun, right?

The teacher is letting us code in Visual Basic in MS Excel. I tried to explain him that I know how to code, but he still wants me to listen to him.

He doesn't even use any indentation! I can't look at it and I don't want to use VB it sucks just let me use js or anything else but not VB! Why won't you just accept I'm 10 times better than you! Just let me do my thing!

Now he thinks he can challenge me with a password strength checker. I want to use js, some regex to make it very short and efficient and a nicely styled web page. But now I'll be forced to use a horrible programming language (VB) I never used before!

Me 2 cents on python:

Cheers on python for enforcing indentation for the sake of readability.

Fuck devs for writing a fucking function in one line or 200char.

Also fuck type less one liners even more.

Concentrating and understanding someone's code/ script. :|

The code is not in class form, does not have comments, and indentation is out of control. T_T

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Unpopular opinion.

TOML sucks

* it does not claim to care about indentation but it actually does
* nested datastructures are a nightmare, especially 'inline' for 'readability'
* oh fuck me everything must be "double quotes"
* booleans always lowercase, there is no "truthy" here.
* Tables are not intuitive at all.

And all this from working with it first time because I had the silly idea to modernize a python project to use pyproject.toml

Oh and don't get me started on pyproject.toml files. The documentation sucks!

Seriously how hard is it to observe proper indentation! Don't mix spaces and tabs! That's why I added the .editorrc .jshintrc .jscsrc in the project repo so you'd use it. I asked you to configure your editor and the only thing you configured was your freaking Sublime theme and color scheme. aaaaargh!!!!!

Did some changes and raised a code review. Some lines' indentation don't align. The senior dev (reviewer) asks me to format according to the project scheme.
Changed all tabs to spaces; lines don't align.
Changed all spaces to tabs (with a heavy heart); surprisingly it still doesn't align!!
I'm like okay, let's dive deeper.. Found that the surrounding lines were indented this way: 4 spaces followed by a tab..!! SERIOUSLY!?! WHY? HOW? I mean how does this kind of shit happen?!
Worst part -> getting ship it after following the current convention!

Mind blow of the week: JavaScript has no "else if".

It's always two tokens. Not one. It's NOT like python's "elif".

It's ALWAYS chaining an additional and DISTINCT if statement in the else clause of the first. It is NOT creating multiple comparison paths in the same if statement as it would seem.

For example:

if(a) console.log(a);
else if(b) console.log(b);
else console.log(c);

Simply needs more proper indentation to show which "if" the "else" actually belongs to:

if(a) console.log(a);
else
if(b) console.log(b);
else console.log (c);

So, this is my first actual rant since I joined devRant and I am not saying I am perfect either. Here goes nothing...
1. I honestly hate it when people use spacebar instead of tabs
2. People who have a bad indentation or no indentation at all (even though almost all IDEs have auto-indentation). The bad thing is when a person asks me to have a look at their code I always end up wasting time fixing the indentation rather the actual problem.
I love a properly indented code and that's one of the major reason I usually recommend Python to most people.
3. Lastly, people who leave lots of unnecessary empty lines. E.g.,

public class HelloWorld{

public static void main(String[]args){

System.out.println("Hello world!");

}

}

I know this topic is tired and this isn't supposed to be a pure "REEEE SPACES BAD" kinda rant but I still don't understand why people would ever use spaces over tabs for indentation. I'm genuinely curious so please give me your arguments in favor of spaces because I just don't understand

So here's my position:
Tabs are objectively better than spaces in every single way
(I know that IDEs also do some of these for spaces, more on that later)
1. They are typed with one key press
2. They can be removed with one keypress
3. They allow for individually configurable width (some people prefer 2 and some 4 width)
4. They take up less memory (kinda irrelevant, but still)
5. You can properly navigate your code using the arrow keys which is much faster than using the mouse while typing
6. You don't have problems with accidentially having one too much or one too little
7. You don't have problems when copy pasting or moving code around (e.g. refactoring)
8. Code is much easier to select with the mouse, and
9. it's much easier clicking the right spot with the mouse where you want to continue typing, which is often at the start of a line

Apart from specific alignment, where spaces are fine (but which also almost never comes up), I just can't see a single thing where spaces are better at. So much so that most IDEs have to *pretend* that they're tabs when typing and removing them. It's so ironic yet people still defend it and big companies still use them.

I feel like I'm going mad 😨

Dev: linters can help us by keeping us focused on important problems.
Linter:

124:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
[...]
150:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
151:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
152:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
153:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
154:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
155:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
156:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
157:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
158:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
159:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
160:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
161:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
162:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
163:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
164:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
165:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
166:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
167:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
168:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
169:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
170:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
171:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
172:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
174:5 ✖ Expected indentation of 2 spaces indentation
175:3 ✖ Expected indentation of 0 spaces indentation

50 problems (50 errors, 0 warnings)

Yesterday my friend called me programming Jesus for getting her code to work properly

She's started learning python. All I did was fix the indentation issues and explain that whitespace is finicky in python and send her a couple of article links about it. pretty boring of an issue

I'm kinda bored I wish someone had a more substantial issue for me to look at and have to actually learn something new to fix it

Considering finding a project on github to try and contribute to as a side project when I need a brake from my projects. But as a worse-than-mediocre college coder I'm intimidated to even try

Background:
I graduated high school from a technical school. And my teacher asked me to come in a few times a week and assist (which I LOVE doing)

So they’re working with circuits and raspberry pi’s and when I can in they pointed out that there was a project they couldn’t get to work. So I had to look at it. Now I was not given the original it was one a student tried to copy in (like they were supposed to) but it was awful. All the indentation was even more off than the original and on top of that. The original and what I was given wouldn’t give an error code.. and so I had no idea what was happening so I just decided to try to fix the indentation and take out stuff that didn’t look right (what else was I supposed to do when I didn’t know where to start?) and while I was doing it another student started to try to fix it and it legit barely took 5 minutes and now my spirit and confidence is broken. I wasn’t petty I observed the result and congratulated him cause he deserved it. After I took the code and put it on my laptop and figured out it was an “inconsistent use of tabs and spaces” error which is fucking stupid and I’ve never seen that in python before so after I debugged that there wasn’t really anything left to debug. So I guess I somewhat redeemed myself but I still feel like shit

the best part of Python is that while debugging others code you don't have to beg to indent the code :3

After a programming exam, a student criticized me for using the "wrong" indentation style: I used 1TBS (opening curly brace on same line), but Allman style (opening curly brace on new line) would be "better" and "preferred by most other students".

The programming language was Go.

A question to JS developers...
Why 2 spaces indentation?

Fuck forced coding conventions in uni, especially if they are as stupid as Google's Java Conventions. They are a disgrace to nice code but we will have to use them going forward

Stupid spaces everywhere. Else on the same line, wtaf. And don't even get me started on indentation with fucking spaces. Tabs are superior in every single way fite me irl

what the hell this friendo just sent me a 100 line Julia function with variables names like `sauce` and `thingy` and expected me to debug it. And I guess his tab key was broken cause there was no indentation at all. Did I mention I’ve never used Julia in my life? Is this just Julia culture?

Looks like ESLint is all confused about my tabs and spaces. I've never seen this kind of error message where it expects the tabs to be the same number as the spaces indentation? I have it configured for 1 tab = 2 spaces.

So confused. Must fix. Red squiggles make my blood hurt.

Fuck python and its indentation oriented typing. Java braces for the win!

Best
typescript - I needed to learn it for a project and I like it, I know java and javascript and it is something in between of those two that makes writing enterprise web applications easier, it’s nice that you can debug it directly in chrome, it makes things easier

Worst
docker, Dockerfiles - devops tools - amount of shell commands inside them and mangled && to make everything running in one file layer makes those unreadable mess that you need to think twice to understand, there is no debugger for it, you do everything with try and see what happens, there is actually no real dev toolset for devops and that sucks, since you got builder images that makes things more mangled than before, it’s clearly missing some external officially approved scripting language or at least
FUNCTION and
WITH LAYER and indentation / parentheses syntax and they still trying to make it flat, why are you doing that ?
as a result next to Dockerfile cause you can’t import multiple ones you get bunch bash scripts with mangled syntax and other crap that is glued together to make a monster - and this runs most of current software on this planet

I'm trying to convert a legacy .NET Framework web api to .NET Core, the project and its supporting libraries are in awful conditions and to make things worse at a certain point someone has the genius idea of introducing Uncle Bob's "Clean" Architecture into a part of it so stuff which could simply look like this

public string doStuff(string input){
// Do the stuff
return output;
}

becomes a convoluted mess like this

public class StuffDoerRequest {
public string Input{get;set;}
}

public class StuffDoerResponse {
public string Output{get;set;}
}

public interface IStuffDoer {
public StuffDoerResponse Execute(StuffDoerRequest request);
}

public class StuffDoer {
public StuffDoerResponse Execute(StuffDoerRequest request) {
// Do the stuff
return new StuffDoerResponse() {
Output = actualFuckingOutput;
}
}
}

Edit: sorry for the lack of indentation, apparently DevRant trims leading whitespace

I used to love tabs and absolutely despise spaces, but a combination of using IntelliJ and company code indentation convention has converted me to the dark side #spacegang

Indentation. Trying to teach students that every expression needs its own indentation is such a pain.

Nothing as painful as working together with a front-end guy who uses spaces for their works and you use Tabs.
I've been battling with Python Indentation error since morning

Using spaces

~Be Better Be You~

Once I maintained one of the most used and fucked up codebases on the market with almost 1M+ daily users. (cannot say more, sorry).

It's written in PHP and is absolutely terrifying,
the first time I saw some lines of code I was about to scream and cry.

- spaghetti code
- no indentation
- random SQL query unoptimized
- unused vars
- Code is split among several files with no logical reasoning
- Mixed procedural and oop programming
- Unsanitised user input (yes, you got it right)

No test environment, no backup database, every commit goes straight to production.

It's a real disaster but the company prefers to keep it as it is without refactoring or anything else.

Just to make it clear:
It's not hatred against PHP, it's against the code's current status and the older programmers which used to work on it.